


Sharon Carter Does NOT Run a Phone Sex Line (And Other Lies She Tells Herself)

by Lasgalendil



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Avengers, Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Awesome Peggy Carter, BAMF Sharon Carter, F/M, M/M, Man Out of Time, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Podfic Welcome, Sharon Carter-centric
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-04
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-08-13 01:37:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7957102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lasgalendil/pseuds/Lasgalendil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Providing security for Steve Rogers should be something of a dream job…instead, it's become Sharon Carter's nightmare.</p><p>Featuring copious geriatric phone sex, Peggy Carter’s porn search history, the long-lost Love Letters of James Buchanan Barnes and far, FAR too much information about Steve Roger’s twentieth-first century love life (or, as Agent Romanoff so naively puts it, lack thereof).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: fic begins in 2011, right before the Valkyrie's discovery in the ice.

She was a Warg. She wore many skins.

This time she was a Nursing Student. Her name was Betty Carver—it was a bit of an in-joke, really. Not that Aunt Peggy could appreciate it. Not anymore. It wasn’t the Alzheimers—not yet. She still had her good days, her lucid days when that dry British wit was sharp as a tack. No. It was security. National Security. Peggy Carter’s memory could not longer be trusted, not to recall facts, no. Her childhood and SSR days were as vivid as her (classified) journals written over fifty years ago. But to _share them._ There’d been a scandal, a paparazzi posing as an analyst to get access for an interview. And Aunt Peggy—  
  
Aunt Peggy said more than she should.  
  
“I was only being thorough,” Peggy’d tutted, patting Sharon’s hand.  “That young man had so very many questions. I was only trying to help.”  
  
Luckily, the room was bugged. (Obviously, the room was bugged.) And SHIELD shut down that Q &A when the burly, curly-haired med tech Sharon had flirted with only occasionally/always and had maybe masturbated to and miiiight even had a setting on her favorite vibrator with his face on it charged in and took the man down with a brutal and effective choke hold that could only be Special Forces (That shit was hot and _illegal as hell_ , Sharon thought later, watching the tape.). They got the asshole in custody, and Aunt Peggy was fine, she was just fine, nothing happened, _she's safe she'ssafeshe'ssafe._ And Sharon shouted at the home's director and staff for a bit, kicked herself for not doing a better background on the listed potential visitors. Berated herself for not being there. But then professionalism and perspective and manners and apologies kicked in as the adrenaline wore off, and logically she knew it wasn't her fault. None of it.

...Okay. Maybe part of it. She cursed herself for not noticing Hot Guy was security detail, not just the very attractive guy with a great ass (shown off very well by that little cart he pushed) and seemingly never-ending supply of applesauce.  
  
“What was it,” she asked him later. “Ranger? Marines? SEALS—?”  
  
But tall, dark and handsome only smiled. “Something like that.” His name tag said James (Also, she learned, an in-joke, by Aunt Peggy herself. Three-quarters of a century later and the SSR’s longest-running gag was still going strong.).  
  
“So you’re private security, then, you’re not with SHIELD?”  
  
“Oh, I’m with SHIELD,” he shrugged, once Aunt Peggy had gone to sleep for the night, and _goddamn those eyelashes_ as she let him drive her back to her place. “But I _work_ for Maggie. She said she didn’t want just anyone spying over her shoulder for the “rest of my goddamn life, Aamir, honestly”. Hired me to keep on eye on her. It was about…oh, February 1991. I would show you the paperwork if you need proof, but it’s classified above top secret and also we burned it shortly after signing, but there you go. Maggie was always paranoid."

"That does sound like Aunt Peggy," Sharon had to agree."Why?"

"Maggie tole me her memory wasn’t starting to go, not then, not yet, but her mother—your great- _great_ grandmother, I presume—started showing symptoms in her late sixties. Maggie wanted to be prepared. Have precautions in place.”  
  
“So you’re what, her employee? Private security guard? Double Agent?”  
  
Aamir laughed as he parked the car. Came around and opened her door. “I prefer to think of myself as ‘friend’.”  
  
She wanted to trust, oh, she wanted to trust. But Aunt Peggy wasn’t the only one who was paranoid ("You’re never paranoid," Coulson always said at SHIELD Academy, "for taking precautions. It's only paranoia if you’re _wrong_." _)._ But it was a dangerous game they were all playing, wasn’t it. And they couldn’t afford even the smallest of errors.  
  
“Feel free to do a background check,” Aamir shrugged those strong shoulders, seeing the gears turn behind her eyes even as he offered his hand, and smiled. “You have her eyes.”  
  
“Any information on you in the public domain is a cover, _James_. And I’m guessing anything the FBI or NSA has on you is just another,” Sharon returned, with as much pretend bite as she might with her (many) Uncle James: Uncle James "Jim" (Morita) or Uncle James “Boom-Boom” (Dernier) or Uncle James “Mommy” _for the love of God, you’re not an infant anymore, Sharon, I know you can say my bloody name_ (Falsworth).

But that was a sobering thought, wasn't it? Dugan was dead. Been gone so long now. Monty went when she was in high school. Dernier had followed too quickly after, called her from Paris, said he’d decided to stop dialysis, and they’d laughed and they’d cried and she called him “Boom-Boom” and he called her _mon cheri_ and that she’d better marry a Frenchman (or woman, he said, French women were excellent lovers) and seven hours later he was dead. She saw Gabe more often than her own parents, even, flying back and forth from L.A. and D.C., the man was in the Capitol more than seated members of congress, really, and still wouldn’t shut up about playing golf with the President every Monday morning (No, really. THANKS, OBAMA.). The man was young as ever, more alive at what, eighty? Ninety? than most people were in their prime, only the graceful whiteness in his hair and laughter lines around his eyes giving him away. “Black don’t crack”, he’d said at their last breakfast. “Yeah, except terrible jokes”, she’d returned, and the linguist in him still got a hoot out of her repeating his terrible dad jokes. Morita still gave her shit sometimes, called her up once or month or so, chewed her ear out for becoming a nurse (“ain’t nothing wrong with being a healer, Christ Almighty, kiddo, I went into medicine but you were meant for so much more” until she’d flat out told him _no, really, she couldn’t talk about her job_ in such a tone that even stubborn Jim Morita shut up and got it. “I’m so proud of you, kiddo! We always knew you’d make a great—uh, nurse.”) She had, too, getting a 3.45 (“Not to go all Asian parent on you, kiddo, but I KNOW you know biochemistry I taught your ass better than that”) and six semesters on the Dean’s List to match with Betty Carver’s ambitious but not-quite-so-studious personality and less than stellar high school resume. Betty Carver was bright but not too bright, kind but not too kind, pretty but not too pretty, turned her work in on time, toed the median, answered questions when asked, someone who fit in, blended into the background, who you’d had a conversation with once in the back of a class or on the floors during clinicals, shot the shit with in a Starbucks line during finals week, maybe, but couldn’t describe to a sketch artist with any meaningful accuracy.  
  
Betty Carver was anyone. Everyone. No One. And Uncle Gabe wouldn’t stop texting her Syrio Forel memes—it’d been bad enough when it was just _The Song of Ice and Fire_ saga.  Now that _Game of Thrones_ had aired there was no escape. Her last goddamned Christmas card was addressed to “A Girl” and he’d even sighed it Jaqen H’ghar. She’d called him up from Switzerland, wished him a Merry Christmas and told he was a pain in her ass. Uncle Gabe said if she thought _he_ was bad, she should thank her lucky stars she never got to meet Uncle Steve or Uncle Sarge.  
  
Uncle Steve. Uncle Sarge. Everyone else called them Captain America, God’s Righteous Man, The Hero. The Howling Commando. Thought Bucky Barnes was just that stuffie they’d had as a kid, either that or that one hot guy in the seventh grade history textbook they'd had their sexual awakening to. Sharon Carter had never got to meet all her Uncles, no. But she’d grown up in their shadows (and legendary TERRIBLE shared sense of humor) nonetheless.  
  
“You could always ask SHIELD,” Aamir teased lowly. And that _was_ a wink, wasn't it.  
  
“Somehow I’m suspicious the only records I can access will go on at length about your boring midwest childhood in Cincinnati or something and your history in the National Guard,” Sharon made up her mind.  
  
“Good guess,” Amir said, gaze gone wolfish, his voice a deep growl. And Sharon knew with a shudder that had nothing to do with the man kissing her that the best cover—the best lies—always contained that tiny grain of truth. He'd served in the Gulf War. Even the National Guard…just, not as an _American_. And certainly not to pay for college.  
  
Operation Desert Shield. Operation Desert Storm. And here he was, ex-Iraqi special forces, now turned SHIELD. Fuck. She’d only been a kid at the time. Aunt Peggy had never said—  
  
“I was captured by CIA and MOSSAD, those motherfuckers,” Amir breathed into her skin as he nuzzled her breasts later that night. “They wanted information. Maggie convinced them to let me go.”  
  
“How?” Sharon asked. Demanded.  
  
“She offered me freedom. My family security. I am a killer, I have no shame. I am a killer and I kill for them. I will fight for anyone willing to keep them safe.”  
  
“You betrayed your country," Sharon wondered.  
  
“I love my children,” Aamir whispered between kisses. “I love my country. I love my God. I had no great love for Saddam Hussein.”  
  
“Why?” She stroked the dark hairs on his chest as she came down. _What did she see in you_. _Why did she save you_.  
  
Aamir smiled. Kissed her again, messy and feral. And she knew, she’d known from the first lust-lidded glance it wasn’t Betty Carver—wasn’t _Sharon Carter_ —he was fucking. “It is what Captain Rogers would have done, no?” And he told her the story.  
  
_You bloody idiots_ , she could hear Peggy’s scathing voice. _What did you think you could possibly gain with violence that you couldn't with love_. Seventy years old, ever the Soldier, still beautiful even then, and she’d seduced him with simple kindness. He’d looked into an Enemy’s face and found understanding, empathy instead of judgment. And in that moment, and every one after, he’d loved her. How could he not?

* * *

In the morning, she made him breakfast. He took his coffee black. He kissed her again, this time softly and in thanks, then went home to the wife he didn't love and the children he’d betrayed his country for _._ There was so much, Sharon thought as she waved from the porch, as Aamir gave her one long, last meaningful glance from the drive, so much of this woman, this wonderful, wonderful woman she loved that both she and the world would never, never know.


	2. Chapter 2

Betty Carver’s infant daughter “Peggy” died just a few days before Captain America came out of the ice.  
  
…at least that’s what the Legends say.  
  
It was a breach of security. Of SHIELD protocol. An abandonment of post. She’d never been one to chose love over duty, but in the moment Sharon had neither the time, the pride, nor the wits to be ashamed. Legends never left so abruptly. Never disappeared. The Mission completed, an agent would debrief at a SHIELD facility, and the Legend would run its course. A cover identity was never truly inactivated, but they never left station under suspicious circumstances, either. Whimsical Mattie Skeeter at Allied Talent Agency left in the middle of the night and gave notice via text message that she’d gotten that theater internship in LA she’d always dreamed of sorry and #YOLO, and if the Agency had been busted for human trafficking of Russian and Estonian infants, children, and women…well. “Mattie” had no knowledge of it. Officer Heather Starkweather left the NYPD with a full two weeks notice, tearful goodbyes and congratulations in order when she’d announced her pregnancy…and if it just so happened to coincide with one of the largest investigations and arrests in arms diversion by law enforcement in the eastern United States, well. “Heather” certainly had known nothing about it.  And somewhere, Sharon knew, somewhere there was a SHIELD Analyst—a team of analysts, even—tasked with running their social media pages, giving those Legends continued internet presence (with enough artful shots of food and annoying baby pictures that they’d be unfollowed or simply ignored on facebook and instagram by anyone who’d remember them). She’d wondered, some days, many nights, laying in the dark alone, how her life could have been would have been different if she’d been content to be one of them. Not just in the shadows, but tucked securely behind the screen.   
  
It was the price she paid, Sharon supposed, for the job she did, for the peace she protected. The everliving loss of friends and family. The never-ending string of one night stands and broken promises. That’s Classified, Aunt Peggy’d always said. What’s classified mean? Sharon had asked her as a child. Classified means I can’t tell you but not that I love you any less. Sharon’s job—Sharon’s whole life—was Classified. Complicated. She admired Aunt Peggy, admired excellence, wanted to prove herself, leave her own mark on the world…and she was stupid and selfish and shit so she missed the call. Missed dozens of calls. Didn’t carry Sharon Carter’s personal phone on the job, not while she was being Betty. So she missed it, Uncle Gabe and Uncle Jim’s frantic voicemails. Tripp’s texts. Didn’t know anything was wrong until they showed up in the middle of her Pediatrics clinical demanding to know just where “Betty” was.  
  
“Uncle Jim? Tripp—? Wha—“  
  
“We need to talk.” And Uncle Gabe looked so serious, so damned dead-serious, as serious as he had been when she’d been twenty-one and walked in on him and Aunt Peggy mid-blowjob. She knew they were still married, still loved each other, but Aunt Peggy had Alzheimers, damnit, she couldn’t consent and she’d been so upset and wouldn’t answer her phone for days and days until Tripp and Uncle Gabe had driven all night and showed up at her dorm to make breakfast and get day drunk and try to explain (Some days they held hands, just swapped old war stories, talked about Aunt Angie and their time together in the 60’s. Some days—the very worst days—she didn’t know where she was, who Gabe was, who Tripp was, kept calling out for Michael, for her long dead parents. Some days she would cry over Steve. Some days she still wept about Sergeant Barnes. But some days—many days—she knew him. She loved him. “So she’s eighty-seven,” Tripp had snapped. “And sometimes senile. But she’s not dead, sis.”).  
  
She’s not dead, sis.   
  
But this time she was. So Sharon started bawling. Right there in the middle of the ward, bloody OR scrubs and all. Cover blown, SHIELD be damned, she didn’t care about some surgeon’s suspected ties to Hamas. Aunt Peggy had died. Aunt Peggy had died and she hadn’t been there, she’d been too damn busy playing soldier, playing spy, there’s a price there’sapriceIlovedmyworkbuttherewasaprice—  
  
“C’mon, sis,” Tripp rubbed her back. “Let’s get you home.”  
  
“I’m s-s-sorry!” Sharon howled. “I should’ve, I would’ve, she can’t be—“

“She who, honey?”

“P-p-peggy!”

“Aw, fuck,” Uncle Jim said. “Kiddo, no.”

“Oh, no, sweetie. Sharon, Sharon! She’s okay,” Uncle Gabe crushed her in a hug. “She’s okay it’s okay she’s alive, Sharon, she’s still alive.”  
  
“Ohmygod,” Sharon sobbed harder. “ _Mom—_?!”  
  
“No no no, shhh, shhh, sweetie. Amanda’s fine. She’s just fine.”  
  
Sharon looked up through streaming tears and snot. Searched their faces. “Th-then no one d-d-died—?”  
  
Uncle Jim and Uncle Gabe were stricken. Tripp stepped in. “I’d say ‘no one’…” he sighed. “But that’s a lie. It’s just he died like, seventy years ago, sis.”  
  
“Steve?” Sharon gasped mid-sob, the shock of it—the sheer absurdity—drying her tears. “Uncle Steve? They found him? They've really finally found him?”  
  
“We don’t know yet, kiddo,” Uncle Jim said, clutching Gabe’s shoulder as the man fell apart. “But they found something in the ice, alright. Might be the Valkyrie, might not be, but it’s already leaked online, soon it’ll be out in the news. She deserves to know, kiddo. She’s gonna find out one way or another… and she deserves to hear it from us.”

* * *

  
“I think you should tell her,” Uncle Jim said later.  
  
“Me?” Sharon blinked. “Why not Uncle Gabe?”  
  
“I don’t mean to go all 2009 reboot on you, kiddo, and I fuckin’ wish I could just man up and do this but I’m—“  
  
“They’re emotionally compromised,” Tripp cut in as Uncle Gabe tried and failed to pull his stoic old man face. He heaved a sob, steadied himself to his shaky feet with his cane and went outside instead.  Morita just shook his head. Wiped a tear. Grated out a hoarse “fuck it,” and went after him.  
  
“Both of them. They’re a mess—wouldn’t you be? They can’t take point on this one.”  
  
“And I _can_ —?” she didn’t mean to snap. But Sharon hated crying. Crying made her miserable, but it didn’t make her vulnerable. It made her mean.    
  
“You get that from me, you know,” Aunt Peggy’d once told her.   
  
“Get what?” fifteen year-old Sharon had snapped. It’d been her first crush, first kiss, first true heartbreak, in the way only a proud, naive teenage girl could ever experience it.  
  
“Oh, I don’t know, what do the kids call it these days,” Peggy sighed, glanced at Gabe in the rear-view mirror.  
  
Uncle Gabe just chuckled. Looked up from his book. “I believe the term you’re looking for is ‘resting bitch face’.”  
  
“Well, I was going to go with ‘becoming a goddamn cunt when wounded’ but yes, you’re right, my darling. Resting bitch face. That’s much kinder,” she rolled her dark eyes. Aunt Peggy had always known how to diffuse that anger, that irrational hate and desire to just lash out, burn the world, be left the fuck alone with her particular brand of hum(u)or (“I got that from your Uncle Michael and Uncle Sarge, you know. Both Steve and I could be such self-righteous pains in the arse.” And that, of course, prompted an inescapable, half an hour long lecture in linguistics after Sharon had accused her of saying it funny.)  
  
“Well _they_ sure as hell can’t,” Tripp argued, somehow staying level-headed. “And it needs to be family. I ain’t exactly a real Carter, sis.”  
  
She’d been, what? Eleven? Hadn’t seen Aunt Peggy or Uncle Gabe for two whole years, not since accidentally discovering the truth about her long-dead Aunt Angie (“Do you ever miss her? Your sister?”). It was the summer her parents divorced, messy and ugly enough they even let her spend a few weeks with “that horrible woman”. And there he’d been, sixteen year-old Antoine Triplett, her very own Dean Thomas, all tall, black, and gangly, awkwardly shy, fresh off a growth spurt and unaccustomed to his newfound height. “Uncle Gabe you’re a _baby-daddy_ —?!” Sharon’d squealed at the sight of her surprise cousin.   
  
“And who says I’m not a baby-momma—“ Peggy had begun, hands on hips, and all four of them wrinkled their noses, laughing together until their sides split. “Oh, Good Lord there’s a phrase I’m never saying again.”   
  
“But you’re white,” Sharon had argued, still giggling. “Like me!”

 “Oh, good Lord. Am I ever. I’m an albino. When did that happen? Gabe, darling? Call Jim. Ask him if that means I’m stuck this color forever.”  
  
Tripp was a black teen, stuck to age out in a failing foster system in a failed DC school district. Peggy and Gabe had never had children. Never had grandchildren. Couldn’t have the contact with their only great-niece they’d truly wanted. “So there I was, seventy-three, and I realized we’d never used our GI bill or SHIELD scholarships. All that money, well. We couldn’t let it go to waste. It was good for any of our children, too. A free ride to college. And there was a child who needed our help. And I was recently retired, and in desperate want of a hobby. Truth be told, I never desired to be a mother. Life was too short, and I had so very much to do. But I do love being an Aunt, darling. Being a grandmother of sorts. And it was good, wasn’t it? While it lasted?”  Peggy and Gabe had wanted to leave a lasting mark, a life behind in addition to their legacy. And what better way? Uncle Sarge had finished high school back in the day when most people didn’t. Pursued university when most men couldn’t. Had dropped out to support Uncle Steve, put him through art school instead, provide him with a steady career, the ability to support himself if the day should ever come he would need to. “There’s always next year, Stevie,” Sharon’d heard the story, from Aunt Peggy, from Uncle Gabe, from Uncle Mommy and Boom-Boom and Jim. Even from Auntie Becca Proctor once, when she’d flown to the states from Tel Aviv just to see Sharon’s sixteenth birthday, her long grey curls soft yet still stiff like coiled wire. Maybe it was guilt, maybe it was pity, but it’d never been misplaced or abused. It was the Rogers-Barnes scholarship, more so than anything, and if Tripp had found a family, if Sharon’d been given a big brother, a cousin, a best friend, a confidante and playmate after a lifetime alone the very summer she felt the loneliest of all…well. Uncle Steve and Uncle Sarge, they’d shaped the very century, the very world. It could hardly be said to be strange they continued to shape her life as well.   
  
  
But it was 2016, now. Aunt Peggy was in a home. Sharon'd slept with her caretaker not a month before. And after seventy years of waiting, Uncle Steve was coming home.  “You’re such a stupid shit,” Sharon choked, buried her face in her brother’s shoulder. “Blood be damned, Antoine Tripplett, you will always be my family.”  
  
“Is this an inappropriate time for the ‘still a better love story than twilight’ meme, or—?” Sharon let out a squawk, half-sob, half-guffaw and punched him in straight in the tit (She’d gotten that—she’d been assured by every single member of the Howling Commandos—from Aunt Peggy, too.).  
  
“You ready for this?”  
  
“I have to tell her they might’ve found Steve Rogers,” Sharon sniffed, cuddling into him on the couch. “So, no.”  
  
“To be fair, I’d be more worried if you’d said yes,” Tripp shrugged, pulled her in for another tight hug. “You want for me to come with—?”  
  
“Nah, champ,” she said. “I got this. You go wrangle the sad old men, okay? I can’t handle it.”  
  
 “Can do."  
  


* * *

“How is she?” Sharon Carter— _Betty Carver_ —asked Aamir later that afternoon.  
  
“She asked for scotch instead of applesauce with her meds this morning, so,” Aamir smiled, his dark eyes sad. They were undercover. Married to another. Married, too, to their work, and one night—or a long succession of one nights—were all they had, all they could ever have. _But he loves her_ , Sharon knew, deep down in her guts. _Aunt Peggy. He loves her and he knows her and he’d die for her and just that alone meant they had more in common, a stronger connection than any man she’d ever met._  
  
“Well,” Betty smiled, that small, placid thing. “I hope you weren’t obliging.”  
  
And Aamir laughed, dark eyes crinkling up at the corners. “No. I told her tomorrow, maybe—“ and with that he took his leave courteously, as from a stranger, and continued to push that cart down the hall.  
  
Sharon watched him, the strong line of his back, the swell of his well-muscled ass, those long lean thighs. She took a deep breath, and looked away. Willed her face calm. Channeled her innermost Sansa Stark. Her very own Peggy Carter. That young SSR Agent, the middle-aged woman overshadowing a bashful JFK, the sixty-something director who turned a man with the sheer force of her wit, will, and love.   
  
Sharon opened the door. Called out quietly, “Hey, Aunt Peg—“  
  
Peggy looked right at her. Took in her tired eyes, worn face, unkempt hair. Smiled. Said “Steve—?” and had a stroke.

**Author's Note:**

> Much like Hurley’s first conversation with Sayid, this started out as a joke and got serious, shit. 
> 
> Aamir’s character is played by Naveen Andrews, because 1) gratuitous LOST references and 2) that man is aesthetically pleasing as fuck and I’m not even a straight girl. You can’t tell me Sharon “Sort of has Daddy Issues and Silver Fox Hunter” Carter would not climb that like a tree.
> 
>  
> 
> حرس العراق الجمهوري :Republican Guard, former Iraqi Special Forces (dismantled after US invasion in 2003)


End file.
